Comments on: Replacing a Hard Drive in a MacBook Pro – The Good, the Bad, The Ugly

By: JasonTomczak

JasonTomczak — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 04:07:00 +0000

Hey Geoff, I would recommend going with a nice 500GB 7200RPM drive or even one of the new 500GB hybrid drives that uses a small SSD inside for OS/app speed and a 7200RPM section for massive storage. Newegg.com has them; like this one.

By: Geoff

Geoff — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 23:39:50 +0000

Hey Jason, what new 7200RMP drive did you switch to (a couple months back)? I’m looking to upgrade my 2008 2.4GHZ MacBook Pro’s 200GB drive out to something MUCH larger. I’ve only got 10GB left and thats because I recently cleaned it up. I am running out of room FAST. Also, what have you been using to clone your drive?

By: JasonTomczak

JasonTomczak — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 03:19:51 +0000

Diii – thanks for the tip. =)

By: Diii

Diii — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 07:13:31 +0000

The above article is was so helpful to me.Hard drives really frustrate at times but they have taught me to also make backups regulary.So i prefer backing up online with safecopy backup.Here at least i know that my files are safe.They keep deleted files forever.

By: JasonTomczak

JasonTomczak — Wed, 20 May 2009 23:52:16 +0000

Hey techguy – you’re right about the drive under-performing. I switched to another 7200RPM drive several months back and things became much faster. =)

By: techguy

techguy — Wed, 20 May 2009 02:40:21 +0000

Hate to say it but, dude you have a “damn i wish it would fail” drive. Something is wrong with the drive, obviously in the early segments. A 7200 rpm drive with twice the cache should rock. I upgraded a tablet pc with a 4300 rpm drive to a wdc 7200 and the tablet kicked butt in winblows. It will be tough until that drive goes “clunk” before they will rma it.

By: Tommy Cutter

Tommy Cutter — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 20:11:27 +0000

Good post, thanks for sharing. FYI, the larger the drive, the slower writing to it is. Creating a couple of partitions for doing specific tasks may speed things up.

By: Nowork

Nowork — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:09:42 +0000

Can’t confirm that. Replaced the 160G drive of my MBP 17″ with a 320GB 7200rpm and the performance difference it very noticeable. Without any official benchmarking I’d say it ‘feels’ like 25 – 30% faster, across the board, but especially running Windows XP under Parallels (drive image, not boot camp).

By: JasonTomczak

JasonTomczak — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 02:55:38 +0000

Oddly enough, the 200GB drive had more cache (16MB vs. 8MB) and runs at SATA 1.5Gb/s, just like the old drive.

The new 320GB drive I ended up using runs almost as fast as the 200GB 7,200RPM drive. Go figure. It could be a complete anomaly. If so, I got the crippled 200GB drive whereas everyone else got faster drives. Oh well.

I’m happy with the 320GB WD drive I’m using now. Of course, now that there are 500GB drives hitting the market, I’ll have to upgrade again.

By: Vermilion

Vermilion — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 22:23:26 +0000

Perhaps this drive has less onboard cache? Or perhaps it doesn’t support SATA-II or NCQ like the old drive did?

I’d check it out. On a laptop, going from 5400 RPM to 7200 RPM isn’t as much of a marked change as it is on a desktop; still, a decrease in performance is NOT normal.